Counting Calories? Relax And Enjoy An Italian Sausage Sandwich . . .

July 14, 1986|By Calvin Trillin, Cowles Syndicate

You've probably been wondering how they figure out just how many calories there are in a 4-ounce Italian sausage. I've been wondering the same thing. You may have been wondering about it for the same reason I've been wondering about it: Maybe they're wrong. Maybe calculating calories is a science that is about as exact as handicapping horses.

Let's consider a liberating possibility: Maybe a scoop of low-fat cottage cheese decorated with fresh orange slices has just as many calories as a 4- ounce Italian sausage.

Let's consider an even more liberating possibility: Maybe a scoop of low- fat cottage cheese decorated with fresh orange slices has just as many calories as a 4-ounce Italian sausage on a roll with fried onions and peppers, plus a couple of cans of beer. Now we're getting somewhere.

My wife says they're absolutely right about how many calories are in a 4- ounce Italian sausage. But how can she be certain? I tell her that a healthy skepticism is an essential of scientific inquiry.

Galileo didn't simply accept the astronomers' explanation of why the sun revolved around the Earth. (''The Earth couldn't move because of the weight of Italian sausage.'') Newton didn't simply accept the conventional explanation of why a dropped piece of Italian sausage fell down rather than up. (''Otherwise, it would keep flying out of the roll.'')

Lately, I've been reminding my wife that earlier this year when William Geist of The New York Times went looking some time ago for the Fashion Foundation of America, an organization that has for years been issuing a widely publicized list of the best-dressed men in America, he found that it amounted to a single old press agent in a one-room office in Brooklyn.

Here we've been accepting the best-dressed list all these years as if it were the scientific findings of an expert panel that went around calibrating people's lapels and testing the sharpness of their trouser creases against day-old bread and checking the lumps in their jacket pockets for Italian sausage sandwiches.

Here my wife has for years been saying things like, ''Maybe if you would dress a little more like Caesar Romero, you would be on the Fashion Foundation of America's list of best-dressed men yourself'' -- or thinking such things, at least, when she said something like, ''You're not really going to go out of the house wearing that jacket, are you?''

''Maybe the calorie counts come from some outfit that has a fancy name like the National Caloric Census Council but amounts to a couple of ex- vaudeville hoofers with a one-room office in Buffalo,'' I said to my wife.

''Don't be silly,'' she said. ''It's done in a lab.''

That, I might just point out, is precisely what she said last year when I asked her what sort of tweezers they could possibly use to extract the caffeine from coffee beans for decaf coffee.

In fact, I don't see the decaf operation taking place in a laboratory. I imagine a building that looks like a gigantic tobacco shed. Dozens of caffeine-

extractors are sitting at long tables, picking away with their tiny, weirdly shaped tweezers.

But what do they do with the caffeine they extract? Is it just piled in heaps around Central American villages, like so much coal slag? If so, isn't there a danger that dogs might sniff around the heaps and end up being wide awake for a year and half?

In other words, there's no reason to assume that this calorie-counting is done in a laboratory. I see the Buffalo operation in an ordinary, rather shabby office that used to be the headquarters of the Western New York Accordion Association. The two ex-hoofers who run it have no scientific experience beyond whatever physics is required to judge the velocity of a rotten tomato thrown from the 10th row. They're often out of tweezers.

''I have the dictionary right here,'' said my wife. ''It says a calorie is the quantity of energy required to raise a thousand grams of water 1-degree centigrade.''

''Exactly my point!'' I said.

I can see the Buffalo guys heating up the Italian sausage to see how much it will raise the temperature of an old coffeepot full of water. ''Jeez, that smells good, Harry,'' one of them says. ''Why don't we toss in some onions and peppers.''

By the time they're eating their Italian sausage sandwiches, the water has been forgotten. ''This stuff must be worth a thousand easy,'' Harry says, smacking his lips.